Big Idea:
Imaging is a key comprehension skill, and here students get to practice it creatively!

Context. As with each step in this project, today's lesson represents a chance for students to show what they have learned this year. Throughout the year, the students have been reading visuals with an eye toward the narrative structure that they lend to various texts, particularly graphic novels (RL.9-10.5), as in this set of lessons from a unit on American Born Chinese. However, using images to construct a message and combining those images with a linguistic text is hard to do; the students will hit a learning curve today with respect to this kind of writing, loosely termed "multimodal writing," but they have gotten some experience with it when they wrote artist's statements earlier this year in a lesson on writing about art.

Today's task. Today's lesson guides students to think through the use of images in conveying a message. By thinking about the interplay between visual and linguistic registers in a literary text and by being strategic with media choices (SL.9-10.5 and W.9-10.6), they can consider how their project is both an act of interpretation and of original communication in its own right.

To begin to get my students to think this way, I will show gatsby tea party and ask:

1.) What details do you notice in this image?

2.) How do the physical props attempt to accentuate the scene as refine and special?

3.) Why do you think a black/white lens was used in post processing? How does that highlight or wash out the white china in the settings?

4.) How can you creatively use images to develop your script's power and effect on the viewers?

5.) What types of factors do you think media specialists consider when selecting images for movies, ads, etc.?

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Lab Time. At this point, I will encourage students to use copyright free images and to keep track of where they got them so that they can produce a strong works cited page in MLA format (W.9-10.8) for their images. I will review the assignment English1ChoiceReading--Book-to-MovieMoviewith the students and given them time to find the right media. Most of this could be done at home, and I suspect that the students will need to spend a good amount of time on this at home, but I want to see first hand what the limitations are and see also if I can help remove any stumbling blocks.

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See my video for an explanation of the flyswatter. Again, we are reviewing vocabulary for finals for the final exam as we did yesterday, but this activity can be a fun way of reviewing a set of words that are already somewhat familiar (L.9-10.4). And the students have the responsibility at home for beginning to review for the final: English 1 final exam REVIEW sheet.